Guy Talk: On Drunken Logic

Drunken logic is a beautiful thing. When that perfect amount of booze sloshes around the canals of your brain, dipping here, crashing there, telling you that it’s probably a really good idea to steal lipstick from your friend’s girlfriend, apply that lipstick on your mouth, approach an attractive woman coming out of the bar and pretend that the two of you just made out in the bathroom.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you don’t remember me?” you ask.

She doesn’t. In fact, she seems to have nothing but contempt for you.

“Well how about this: I don’t remember you!” you respond, acting exasperated.

Your little shenanigan accomplishes exactly nothing. But isn’t that the beauty? you ask yourself, still drunk.The aphrodisiac effect of drunken logic is a beautiful thing. You remind yourself that if your willingness to be a completely intoxicated buffoon worked once to woo a lady, it could work again. Again, this is the drunken logic speaking. But dejected, and still wearing lipstick, you consider it truth.

It was a Thursday night in Berlin and I was shitfaced. The American group I was with was in the back of the pub, playing Never Have I Ever with gargantuan glasses of beer. I had just lost and needed a refill. I looked over the expat crowd as I waited for the beautiful transvestite waitress to serve me another. This was not drunken logic, the waitress actually was a transvestite, and a rather beautiful one at that. Gleaning over the crowd my eyes fell pair, by pair, onto those of the candlelit meanderers.

Most avoided my glance, but finally, a pair stared back. A blue pair, with a mop of brown curls, which bounced above a beautiful grey dress. She looked back at me and … smiled?

She looked again! At me. Or was it at me? Maybe it was at the transvestite waitress? Maybe my cheeks weren’t rouged enough for her. In kicked the drunken logic like some big malevolent beast.

Move, the booze told me. Move away, and watch her from a distance. If she looks back to where you were standing, and you’re no longer there, she’ll look for you, thus proving she wants you.

My drunken logic plan made perfect sense to me.

I sprinted across the room, almost falling over a table. I crouched behind it instead. The occupants looked at me quizzically. I didn’t mind. A scientific experiment was underway. I watched. I waited. The beautiful woman looked to where I had been standing, and then looked around the room.

HA! It worked! She was looking at me.I staggered over to her table, and plopped myself down.

“Hey,” I said.

She smiled. I smiled. “Ow’re you?” I asked.

With this slurred sentence I probably would have cleared out a table of women back home, yet this Romanian beauty remained seated.

“I am goot,” she said, in her thick accent.

Good, I thought. I am glad you are goot.

We talked about the basics, why we were here, what our names were, all of which I forgot immediately, and asked again. She chuckled at my buffoonery. She pulled a cigarette out and asked if I had a match. I did. I struck it, cupping it around her cig, then licked my index finger and thumb and put the match out.

She arched an eyebrow and said, “You like fire?”

“Yes, I like fire,” I responded.

My drunken logic told me to show her I was a man! I licked my fingers again and put out the candle on the table.

“Oh, you really like fire,” she purred.

I leaned forward onto the table, accepting her obvious challenge.

“Yeah! I really like fire,” I bellowed, beating my chest like an orangutan.

I grabbed the cigarette out of her mouth, licked my fingers and … HOLY MOTHER OF GOD! [Insert expletives here]. I tried not to show her how much it hurt. I tried to play it cool. I pretended the tears streaming out of my eyes were because of a really sad war story I just remembered. When she asked which war, drunken logic told me to tell her, “The war inside of me.”

“Are you okay?” she asked concerned.

“Yeah. Totally,” I replied, drunken logic instructing me to shove my hands into her full glass of beer.

My hand was fully submerged in her mug. She should have smacked me then and there.

But instead she asked, “Should we get another drink?”

I took my hand out of her beer, and leaned forward, saying very, very seductively, “Only if you’re buying.”

This would have been the prime moment for her to have smacked me yet, for some reason she was willing to keep interfacing with my drunken logic beast. She was willing to buy me a shot of Jagermeister, and even introduce me to her three Romanian friends. All guys. All big. All hairy. All unusually quiet, as if plotting my death. They asked if I’d like to leave with them for another bar. I shrugged my shoulders, thinking why not?

Why not?! WHY NOT?! There are a hundred reasons why not, all of which hit me, after I stopped a block down, ran into another bar telling the Romanians I needed to use a bathroom.

Standing at the urinal I spoke the reasons aloud. Told the reasons to myself. But one reason above all hit me. A reason I held to be truth. Accepted it in my veins, in my head, in my heart and allowed it to fully control me. The words were smart and well thought out, drunkenly I said them aloud:

That bitch is a gypsy. She wants to … She wants to take me … my stuff. Away from me.

I shook, zipped and flushed. Pausing, before I exited to take all the Euros out of my wallet and put them into my shoe. Drunken logic suggested it was the right think to do. The Romanians were waiting outside.

I stumbled over to the girl and said, “I’m going home, d’ya wanna come?”

I crossed my arms, daring her to say yes.

Lie, gypsy. Tell me you want to go to bed with me. Without your henchmen your gypsy ways are nothing.

“Let’s take a cab,” she said.

I was now completely, and utterly convinced this woman was a gypsy. A very keen gypsy.

“Yes, let’s get that cab!” I slurred.

We drove the three blocks to my apartment. The meter shut off and I took my shoe off, pulled a few euros out. She asked if I always keep my money in my shoes. Drunken logic: She wants to steal your secrets.

We walked up to my apartment. I opened the door and directed her to my bedroom and told her to wait there. I ran to the living room, grabbed my laptop, my roommate’s laptop, both of our passports and for some reason a kitschy sombrero we bought at the Turkish market. I ran into my roommate’s room. The lights were off and he was sleeping. I ratcheted the closet door open, and threw threw our valuables in, loud enough that he woke up.

“Noah, what the hell are you doing?” he whispered.

“We’ve got company,” I told him. “I think she’s a gypsy.”

In the end she was not a gypsy; I was an idiot. But somehow, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the one woman in the world who might have found any of my behavior charming. In the end my drunken logic paid off with a beautiful Romanian woman. Indeed it was a beautiful thing. And someday it will work again.

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